R&D team achieves more than 15-fold improvement in biocatalyst production efficiency

LOS ANGELES, CA – (October 4, 2017) — Vitality Biopharma, Inc. (OTCQB: VBIO) (“Vitality Biopharma”, “Vitality”, or the “Company”) a corporation dedicated to the development of cannabinoid prodrug pharmaceuticals, and to unlocking the power of cannabinoids for the treatment of serious neurological and inflammatory disorders, today announced the achievement of a biosynthesis breakthrough.

Vitality has developed a proprietary biosynthesis technology that can modify cannabinoids in order to create pharmaceutical prodrugs that have no psychoactivity and that are able to provide targeted disease treatment. This process involves small molecule glycosylation, where sugar molecules are attached to cannabinoids, creating new compounds known as cannabinoid glycosides, or cannabosides. Details of these compounds have been previously released: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/30/104349.

Small molecule glycosylation is well known within the pharmaceutical industry to modify and in many ways improve drug properties for cannabinoids and many other compounds, but traditionally the chemical synthesis of glycosides has been very challenging. Over the past several years, Vitality has developed efficient methods for biosynthetic production of glycosides, rather than chemical synthesis, and is now reporting a marked improvement to these biosynthetic production methods. The Company was able to recently improve the yields of its primary enzymatic biocatalyst more than 15-fold, and over the course of the past year to reduce more than half the amount of time necessary for its production in large fermentation batches. This enzyme is a key component of Vitality’s proprietary biosynthesis methods and it was originally derived from the Stevia plant. In late 2015, the Company discovered that that the enzyme was far more promiscuous and more broadly useful than researchers within the stevia industry had ever appreciated before. This discovery led to an international patent filing covering a new class of cannabinoid pharmaceutical prodrugs: https://www.google.com/patents/WO2017053574A1.

“With our cannabinoid pharmaceutical program, we are quickly moving from ‘bench to bedside,’ so it’s important to recognize technical milestones like this one that have enabled and sped our progress,” said Robert Brooke, CEO of Vitality Biopharma. “Our team first pioneered enzymatic biosynthesis methods for cannabosides and now has made their production far more efficient and scalable.”

About Vitality Biopharma (OTCQB: VBIO)

Vitality Biopharma is dedicated to unlocking the power of cannabinoids for the treatment of serious neurological and inflammatory disorders. For more information, visit: www.vitality.bio. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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